The Monument of Hope
by frustratedstudent
Summary: Conversation at the barricade


_A/N: A barricade-day fic of mine. I'll get back to writing "Acquaintance with Responsibility" soon enough. _

_I don't own the Amis. If I did, history would be rewritten. Sadly, and thankfully, these awesome boys belong to Victor Hugo. _

_The title is inspired by the OFC version of "A la Volonté du Peuple"_

**The Monument of Hope**

_June 6, 1832_

Even while Enjolras watched the entrance to the Rue de la Chanvrerie, his mind drifted off from time to time to other possibilities. Sometimes he counted out the few cartridges he still had with him, pondering the bloody purpose they would be set to. "_If only someone would come out with a message from Saint-Merry or elsewhere," _he also caught himself thinking. While he was pretty sure that for the most part, the defenders of the Halles had been abandoned, something within him still clung on to the chance that the gunfire and artillery would be enough to jolt the people of Paris out of their beds.

He hardly noticed when someone climbed up to his vantage post on the barricade. "If you're going to do sentry duty, Enjolras, you may as well have these," Feuilly said as he set down a handful of cartridges. The slender fanmaker's dark hair was disheveled, his clothes were dirty, his hands shook with weariness, but there was still good cheer and camaraderie in his voice.

Enjolras shook his head. "Thank you, but I don't think I will take them. You and the others upstairs will need them soon enough. I have some already here," he said, indicating the small store he had with him.

"And when those run out?"

"There are other uses for a carbine."

Feuilly smiled wryly. "We're never going to get out of here, I know. I always feared I would die here in Les Halles, but of something like the cholera."

"It might have taken some of the best of us before yesterday," Enjolras pointed out. "Some of the leaders were stricken and buried even before Lamarque was."

"I suppose people will very well remember him as the Bonapartist general who was a man of the people, and whose death triggered an uprising," Feuilly noted with a sigh. "If only it had been a revolution!"

If only. The word would have weighed on Enjolras at any other time, but now it had quite the opposite effect. "Maybe the time isn't really now," he said softly.

"Like in the way that the people of Poland still struggle, step by step towards liberty," Feuilly pointed out. "So many have fallen, and will fall, and a good number of them will simply be forgotten."

"_Like we will," _Enjolras almost said, but he checked his tongue. "It never matters at the instance when one is caught in the great conflict," he said after a few moments. After all, what was the importance of one's own name when confronted with the clear light of dawn for all?

"For once I am glad I have no family to say things about me when this is over," Feuilly quipped. "I will be remembered simply as a man who fell with his friends while forwarding the cause of the people."

"In that way I envy you," Enjolras said. Although he had taken care to leave a note for his parents and some small bequests to sympathetic friends who had helped him, but were unable to fight at the barricades, he now pondered fully the scenes that would surely unfold once he had passed on. "_My father may very well wish he had not taught me at all about Robespierre," _he thought ruefully.

By this time, Feuilly had found a place to sit nearby. "Just names, that's what we'll be. As far as I know, none of us has any posterity to speak of, nothing much to hand down to those who will come after us other than the record of what we did here," he said quietly. "Maybe some of us will be referred to as the sons who never came home or the students who never finished their studies, but in the end it will always go back to us having lived and died as revolutionaries."

"_Which was what I always knew it would come to, at least for me," _Enjolras reminded himself. This had been the reason after all that he had lived as strictly as he could, disregarding romantic entanglements and various other intrigues in favor of friendships that were aligned towards the cause he had lived and now was going to die for. He had long grappled with the demons of regret and temptation, and now he was left with nothing else but the clearest purpose of what he had to do now.

"I made a promise to myself, Feuilly," the younger man said in a far-off tone. "I swore some time back that if it would come to this, if it would be necessary to die for France, I would not turn my back or shirk. I even hoped I would be the first to lay down my life," he continued.

"No one is going to build a monument to that sort of martyrdom," Feuilly noted grimly.

"The only monument to that would be in the hearts of the people who will come and take up the struggle long after we are gone," Enjolras replied, looking towards the glimmers of light past the Rue Saint-Denis.


End file.
